The typical process by which architects and engineers are hired and do their work includes many steps. For example, an owner develops a concept that describes a proposed building's use and approximate size. He then engages the architect. The architect hires the required engineers, and the team produces a design and a contract document in keeping with the concept and budget. This contract document is composed of computer-generated Drawings and written Schedules and Specifications. Taken together these documents represent all physical and cost aspects of the complete building. Currently, the graphics software used in this process is industry specific; the text software is general business.
The aspects of the contract document, including the Detail, Specification and Schedule, are then bid by general contractors and, after some revisions, are assumable into a contract between the owner and the contractor. The architect observes the construction for compliance with the design.
The architect's prime interest lies in the conceptualization and design development phases. The creation of the aspects of the contract document, however, including the Detail, Specification, and Schedule development (aspects of the contract document), as well as their coordination, require high technical expertise and precision, and are considered drudgery by many. These tasks often suffer from lack of time, interest or sufficient experience. In fact, they are often performed by junior members of the firm who lack the experience to do them efficiently and thus require extensive oversight by senior members of the firm. Shortcomings in the final document may result in project cost overruns for the owner and hours of unanticipated work for the architect.
In view of this, several chronic problems exist in the architectural, engineering and construction industry. One is the backbreaking amount of detail work required of the professionals, within ever shrinking schedules, resulting in higher stress, higher costs and lower incomes. Another is the difficulty and time-consuming process of obtaining manufacturer's information as it is needed. Compounding these problems is the existence of only a few options for automating any portion of the architectural design development process. This industry is one of the least automated of all industries.
Architects and engineers are hired to design buildings and other structures. In order to get these structures built, the architects and engineers produce what is called a contract document, which comprises several complimentary aspects, including the agreement between the Owner and Contractor; the drawings, which include plans, elevations, sections, and Details; Schedules, which list attributes of repetitive building parts such as doors, windows, hardware, and finishes; and the Specifications, which are the written, detailed descriptions of the materials and processes that make up the building. A Schedule, for example, would indicate to a contractor what type of finish a door might have, and a Specification would indicate how that finish is applied.
At present, these aspects are created primarily manually and independently of one another. Even in circumstances where the process of creating aspects of the contract document is automated, that automation is often incomplete, and it often results on less than all of the aspects of the contract document being created, leaving additional manual work for the architect. One such existing system, which includes both incomplete automation and produces only one aspect of the contract document is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,976,213 to Letourneau, et al. In that system the process of creating an aspect of the contract document is partially automated by correlating pre-written specification sections with user terms found in a computer aided design (CAD) drawing. However, while the specification sections in that invention are pre-written, the process of correlation still involves human intervention (e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,976,213, col. 7, 1.66-col. 8, 1.1 “The person scanning the drawing now has the opportunity to ‘bind’ the user tag brick pavers on sand with the system default tag sand”). Further, even that limited automation generates only the specification aspect of the contract document; the aspects of the detail and schedule must be created manually. Thus in many prior art systems, each of the aspects of the contract document requires its own input and execution, and the coordination between each is done manually by the architect and engineer. Each of these aspects has it own characteristics. Some are project specific and others are simply modifications or variations on a standard Detail.
In preparing aspects of the contract document, including Drawings and Specifications, architects and engineers rely on production tools, such as computer programs, and information, such as manufacturers' literature. Architects and Engineers perform tasks at the levels of output; that is, they produce aspects of a contract document in their final form; there is no intermediate input form process that they use. A Schedule, which is a device used by architects and engineers to provide detailed information about a door, window, room finish or the like, is created for each item in a CAD format or in spreadsheet form where each cell is populated manually. A Detail, which is a drawing that shows the actual assembly of parts, is drawn one line at a time or old files are retrieved and modified. A Specification is prepared by modifying a previous Specification or using a database or word processing-based template. The production tools that attempt to assist with more than one aspect of the contract document do not do so automatically in that the process of generating a second aspect, if it is available at all, requires additional steps beyond a single entry of information into the system. Such additional steps may include downloading a Detail library and separately selecting generic Details that may additionally require modification to reflect the various attributes desired. Thus, the drawing, specifying, and product selection are three distinct processes that are currently disconnected and not automated. More recently, for Specifications, a program using an actual user interface that is not in a word processing format has been available; it uses a directory tree structure. Also available is a program that uses a database format user interface where text is viewed in a data base cell. The present invention advances the automation of the architectural process by use of a system that provides for a single entry of information for assembling the data required, for generating the aspects of the contract document used by Architects and Engineers, and for allowing such single data entry and contract document generation to be integrated with a CAD interface which allows the user to flexibly create architectural drawings.